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Monday, December 17, 2007

This is a presentation I developed for the State of Washington that is an introduction to Second Life for instructors who have never heard of it before. This is for those faculty members who you know would benefit from this but don't really know what it is. I made this using Articulate Presenter. I have more presentations coming soon on developing curriculum in Second Life and how to design assignments.

Friday, December 14, 2007

We here are Tacoma Community College are going to be more involved in film making. I want to do more to capture on film things that teachers do in the classroom that works well for other teachers. This collection of of links for Karl Kapp showed up just in time!

Thursday, December 13, 2007

As strange as this sounds, people seem to care as much about how you look in Second Life as they do in First Life. You may remember what this is: it is a world filled with avatars who fly around, have jobs, socialize and meet for education projects. And Second Life is like this too. After talking with people in Second Life, some told me that my avatar was unprofessional looking -- it was too generic and too new looking. It was like representing the school in a dirty rain coat. I had a lot of lindens (Second Life money) because a paid account gets an allowance. I rarely spend any money because I spend most of my time in education sites and projects were stuff is free or very cheap. But I started to talk to people in and out of Second Life and they said "yes, it does matter." I shows that I don't care what I look like, have not spent anytime customizing my avatar, and that I must not hang out with regulars and veterans of the virtual world. I was stunned at first but why would it be any different in Second Life as it is in First Life? I went with an acquaintance who decided to help me shop for skin, hair, eyes and clothes (out of mercy for me and to preserve her reputation as someone who does not hangout with newbie dorktards). It felt like a cross between "Frankenstein" and "Queer Eye." We teleported to all of these shops looking at avatar bodies. We picked one that looked vaguely like me if you were looking into a Futuroscope with squinty eyes into an alternative universe in which I was reincarnated as a male model. The skin has raging muscles, tan, gorgeous, and the package comes with a flaccid penis. You can wear it or not just like a pair of sunglasses. I never thought I would ever live to say that I would PAY for a flaccid penis. I bought hair, eyes that look like they reflect light and move, nice clothes, and a Rolex watch. My old avatar had died and was reborn in Orange County.

It is strange looking at all this as a Buddhist. There in Second Life, avatars are born, live in an essentially immaterial world and crave material things.

Sunday, December 09, 2007

CogDogRoo � StoryTools: "The Fifty Tools Below you will find 50 web tools you can use to create a story. Again, your mission here is not to review every single one, but pick one that sounds interesting and see if you can produce something. I have used each tool to produce an example of Dominoe story and links provided where available to examples by other people. Please share your products or thoughts in the discussion area of this wiki."

I beg to differ. I think we do need a review of each of these tools. Not all web 2.0 tools were created equal. I think this would be a good project for this blog as each one of these could certainly be used in my English classes.

Rob Cottingham at Social Signal wrote a brief posting on the Second Life Framework project. This allows interaction between Drupal and Second Life. I work as a consultant for the Tacoma Challenge which is using the open source content management system Drupal as its platform. We are also using Second Life in the nursing program. This new module is exactly what companies like Blackboard have been looking for: a way to get projects and scripts in Second Life to speak to programs and databases outside of SL. Blackboard offered a $25,000 prize for anyone who could do this in Bb. I think it is extremely typical, funny, and ironic that the ones who do it first are the open source community. The state board in WA has just purchased an island in SL to host projects at the various community and technical colleges. This integration of Drupal and SL will certainly be on that list of projects.

This story has a lot of interesting implications for virtual worlds. When the story first went around, it sounded like someone was arrested for stealing a virtual item, and in a sense, this is true. But the really critical issue is that the teens stole passwords to gain access to account that had money associated with them. This is just fraud.

About Me

I am an instructor and education consultant. I am interested in open education resources, open textbooks, online teaching and learning, course development, and Connectivism. I have also taught English at all levels both face-to-face and online.